Monthly Archives: May 2014

Volatility arbitrage though not new, has taken on a new dimension, as several new hedge funds have begun to deploy strategies involving VIX futures and options. We’ve seen the VIX universe continue to expand in surprising ways. For instance, a major investment group that principally trades energy and interest rate products, recently became a Trading Privileged Holder, or TPH at CFE. Other new users include European investors trading VIX products against fee stocks, a measure of volatility of the Euro Stocks 50. And banks in Brazil, now actively using VIX products for macro hedging. We also see increasing numbers of customers that sell implied volatility short, which has been an active topic in many trading forums. Its important to note we are still in the early stages of developing previously-identified customer segments globally, such as hedge funds, CTAs, proprietary trading firms and institutional investors. Many customers in these categories are early adopters meaning there is considerable room to further expand every category of VIX user. Quite simply, we believe investors of every type can potentially benefit from the added dimension of pure volatility provided by VIX futures and options, and that education is the key to unlocking that potential. – Ed Tilly CEO, CBOE (Q1’2014 Earnings Call, source: www.SeekingAlpha.com)

Most Americans and Europeans have easy 24×7 access to clean water and can drink as muchand whenever they feel like. But for 750 million people around the world, purified/clean water is a luxury. Women and young girls in low-income countries walk about 3.7 miles each day to collect water – a total of 40 billion hours a year. Every year poor children miss nearly 440 million school days because of water scarcity. That’s why Matt Damon and Gary White co-founded Water.org, a nonprofit dedicated to providing clean water to impoverished families and individuals living in Africa and Asia. Continue reading →